


Caitlin Farmer and the Dollar Store

by greenbucket



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Gift Giving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:36:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbucket/pseuds/greenbucket
Summary: Cait can never resist the dollar store when she goes by.





	Caitlin Farmer and the Dollar Store

**Author's Note:**

> ~~You know, in hindsight and some quick googling I'm not sure Caitlin ever gets called Cait? But here she is.~~ Turns out she does, thanks thisprobably!
> 
> Inspired by tumblr user pongpalace's adorable [charmer headcanon post!](http://pongpalace.tumblr.com/post/166652332714/bangs-fist-on-the-table-charmer-charmer)
> 
> Unbeta'd.

Cait can never resist the dollar store when she goes by.

It’s unfortunate, since it’s nestled right between her favourite grocery store and the go-to second hand bookshop so she goes past it quite a lot. Luckily, it’s a dollar store so she isn’t sweating the amount of spending yet; equally luckily, people seem pretty touched when Cait presents them with a gift apropos of nothing, else her desk would be covered in all the random crap she picks up.

So far, she’s gifted March three pomegranate face mask sachets, April three whistles on multicolored string, Nursey a pair of toothbrushes that he’d been mock-offended by, Chris a ten-pack of bouncy balls, Dex a balloon pump with the outline of Minnesota on it, and the girls on the team enough plastic cups and cutlery to last at least two parties and three barbeques. She’s got her eye on a set of the ugliest colored paints she’s ever seen for Lardo and a whisk with a cowboy on it for Bitty, but Cait is pretty sure they’re going to get slapped with an extra-reduced sticker soon enough.

It’s only the second week of the semester. Cait admits she might have a problem, but what’s a few dollars that she’d probably only spend on something temporary like food when she could be buying cheap and/or ugly and/or semi-useless junk for her friends.

So she’s in the dollar store again after her afternoon lecture lets out – because she’d been meaning to go to buy a new loaf of bread and especially so after she’d had to carefully cut away the mould on her toast that morning – and that’s when she sees it, right near the door: A shark-patterned notebook.

It’s entirely not fit for purpose. The paper quality is terrible, the pages grey and thin as rice paper when Cait flips it open, the kind prone to shedding into the roller of a ballpoint, and there are probably about forty sheets total. It would last maybe two weeks of the life of a college student, tops. The spiral bind looks simultaneously weak enough to barely manage holding the forty pages in place and mean enough to leave a mark for hours.

But it’s got sharks on it. Little cartoon ones in diagonal lines across a blue background, entirely anatomically incorrect and with the shittiest printing quality she’s seen in a while but still. Chris would _love_ it. That is, not it; Cait knows it’s an objectively crappy notebook and that Chris will know it’s an objectively crappy notebook. It’s not about the notebook, just like none of the other little gifts she’s collected over all the trips to the dollar store were actually about the thing itself.

As the saying goes, it’s the thought that counts. Cait loves to let people know she’s been thinking about them even when they’re not around and she loves to buy them cheap and ugly things and watch the small joy people find in them. The little nudge of love in a gag gift.

And she knows Chris _loves_ them. For her birthday he’d handed her six separately wrapped gifts and they were all from the dollar store and that would have been enough for her – she’d almost cried over the tiny plastic scuba diver in a glitter globe because he’d _remembered_ , he’d remembered that time she’d talked for a half hour straight about when she was a kid and wanted to scuba dive for mermaids – except he’d also made her a lopsided cake with Bitty and then mini-golfing. They’d seen an ugly cute cat on the way back and stopped for twenty minutes to coo at it and stroke it’s ugly head. It was the best birthday.

The point is, Cait loves to give small gifts and she loves Chris and she loves to give him small gifts to let him know she loves him. And both of them love sharks, she’s got more shark-and-Sharks-themed belongings than she knows what to do with at this point and half of them are Chris’ anyway, shyly given and taken after dates and proudly bestowed out of the blue. It’s their thing.

The point is, she’s wasting another $1.50 on dollar store crap for her boyfriend and no one is going to stop her.

Cait has time to run back home for a snack and then run to practice. It’s late by the time they’re done and she’s tired but she needs to fit in studying so she heads over to the group study space so her and Chris can study together, and so neither of them will be distracted by their loud housemates or the call of a soft bed. She stakes out the pod with the comfortable chairs that can spin but aren’t broken and don’t randomly drop their height mid-studying and spreads her books and laptop and water and snacks across it until Chris arrives. Some people give her dirty looks but it’s ten at night on a Tuesday and everyone knows study space rules don’t apply at ten at night on a Tuesday.

Cait’s almost forgotten about the shark notebook she’d bought until she spots it fallen to the bottom of her rucksack, probably getting a little rough around the edges with all the crumbs and flotsam that hang around down there.  She tucks it under her actual notebook, ready for when Chris arrives. She’s already trying not to smile thinking about how he’s going to react.

When he finally does arrive he looks just about ready to go to bed but the loud thunk of his backpack on the table lets her know he means business. He gives her a kiss on the cheek and then pulls out three different textbooks and a massive pad of lined paper, plus a separate pad of squared paper, and four different colored highlighters, and a calculator. Then his laptop and two bottles of water. Then three different pens and two worn-down pencils.

“All right, I’m ready,” he announces, looking at all the things with no small amount of alarm. “I’ve let all my studying slide this week, but tonight’s the night! I’m going to get it all done.”

Cait can relate; she already feels about four weeks behind where her professors expect her to be and she’s not quite sure how she’s got there. At least her and Chris can support each other emotionally in this trying time, and physically by poking each other awake, even if some of the courses he’s taking are indecipherable to her and Chris is no marine biologist so there’s not much in the way of academic support.

And speaking of emotional support:

“Well I got you a little something to help,” Cait says, pulling the shark notebook out from under her work. “Look! Isn’t it cute?”

Chris stares at the notebook. And he stares at the notebook. He stares a bit more and Cait starts to wonder if maybe she’s found the one ugly gift Chris _doesn’t_ like when his face breaks into a smile, the kind that makes her feet feel grounded and her entire chest feel warm.

“Oh my God, I love you,” he says, and he takes the notebook from her hand, inspecting the cover and the useless pages. “Oh my God, Cait, I _love_ you.”

Cait feels herself going pink even as she says, “Okay, it is pretty cute and you know I love you too, but I didn’t really think it was _that_ cute?”

But Chris is laughing now and rooting around in his endless backpack only to pull out–

The shark notebook. The dollar store shark notebook that he just took from Cait and is still holding in his other hand.

“Oh my God,” Cait says, taking the notebook from him. They bought each other the same fucking ugly dollar store shark notebook. This is a moment – forget every other instance where she’s looked at Chris and thought _there’s no one else that gets me like this_ , forget every sweet and thought out gesture, forget the sex. They really _are_ soulmates. “Oh my God, Chris, I love you.”

Between studying, they use up six pages of one of the notebooks playing hangman and three playing a hard-fought, best of three noughts and crosses with Cait cheating because he knows how ticklish Chris is and she never said she was above fighting dirty. A good fifteen pages of the other notebook are lost when Chris knocks over his water bottles trying to escape the tickling.

Everyone is giving them dirty looks at that point, but Cait is still giggling as her and Chris move their non-dollar-store-items to safety and run to the bathroom for tissues. The next morning she gives her notebook – the water-damaged one, thanks Chris – pride of place in her corner of dollar store crap on her desk.


End file.
